Inspiring women: Anni Albers

I hadn't looked closely at the work of Anni Albers in years and then I was rooting through some stuff over the weekend and found myself looking at her work with fresh eyes.

I was struck immediately by how Albers continues to influence makers and artisans. Many of my current Etsy favourites could be viewed as a footnote to her work. And given this resonance with out current aesthetic (triangles galore and hardware-derived jewelry, in particular), her work looks startlingly contemporary.

Anni Albers was born in 1899 and went to the Bauhaus as a student in 1922. At the Bauhaus, she experimented with new materials for weaving and executed richly colored designs on paper for wall hangings and textiles in silk, cotton, and linen yarns in which the raw materials and components of structure became the source of beauty.

She met her husband, Josef, there too and the couple lived alongside artist teachers including Klee and Kandinsky until they emigrated to the US in 1933 to work at Black Mountain College. Anni taught and made her extraordinary weavings and developed new textiles.

During these years Anni Albers's weavings were shown throughout the US and she published many articles on textiles and design. This activity culminated in her 1949 show at the Museum of Modern Art - the first exhibit of its kind for a textile artist. Her seminal text On Weaving was published in 1965.

Later, the couple moved to Yale and there Anni took up printmaking and lithography. She continued to travel, to make prints, and to teach until her death in 1994, at the age of 94, in Connecticut.